Help GIMP getting awesome scaling methods with new samplers!

Compared to Photoshop you maybe noticed that down/or upscaling images results in poorer quality in GIMP than in Adobes graphics flagship. With your help this could change … very soon!

Crowd funding is a concept of raising money from lots of different sources (many people donate to a special project). There was a discussion already if the whole GIMP development should be speed up using this kind of development. It was rejected for the main development. But the concept itself is awesome – the money is raised to support one or more developers which spend the time working on the project. Without they wouldn’t be able to fully work on that and it would take ages to have something completed.

On freedomsponsors.orgNicolas Robidoux (he is working on GEGL for many years and is also involved in ImageMagick and VIPS) started a project that will heavily improve scaling methods in GIMP (via new and improved GEGL samplers). The whole project needs a lot of time! So he divided the project into 8 steps (one followed one by another) that are worth 5500 USD in total (~20+ weeks of development for all steps). That means if you donate, GIMP will definitely benefit from it, whether if only 2 or all 8 steps are funded through your help.

If you ever wanted to have high quality state of the art scaling in GIMP (which is definitely needed!) donate to this project! It directly flows into GEGL (GIMPs new graphics engine) and will be available in the next version of GIMP.

Nicolas already completed step 1+2 now and was already paid for these steps. Currently he's stuck with bugfixing GIMP systems that prevent further development of the samplers. But when done step 3 is following, because enaough money was sponsored for this already!

Step 1+2 resulted in faster computation of the sampling and a higher quality of the output due to more mipmap levels.